“Mörkrummet” begins as a story about a daughter and her estranged father, but it unfolds into something far deeper, a meditation on gender, survival, and the messy work of forgiveness. In the Swedish edition of In the Darkroom, translated by Patricia Piolon, Susan Faludi takes readers on a journey that stretches from war-torn Budapest to the uneasy terrain of family reunion, from the ghosts of the Holocaust to the rebirth of identity in its most literal form. At its heart lies a story of transformation: a father who became a woman, and a daughter who became her witness.
When Susan Faludi received that fateful email in 2004, she was not expecting news that would unravel her own ideas of gender, identity, and forgiveness. Her father, once a stern and often violent patriarch, wrote to announce: “I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.” Attached were photographs. A seventy-six-year-old woman in a sleeveless red chemise, her eyes tired after surgery, signed the email, “Love from your parent, Stefánie.” For Susan, who had spent most of her life estranged from her father, it was an earthquake in slow motion. How could the man who had once terrorized their home now stand before her as a woman?
Their reunion in Hungary is the book’s beating heart. Faludi travels to Budapest with her reporter’s toolkit and a daughter’s apprehension. She meets Stefánie in a red sweater and pearl earrings, the familiar Hungarian accent still curling around every word. Their first moments together are full of awkward humor and subtle cruelty. Faludi can’t help noticing the dissonance between her father’s bald spot and her white heels, or the discomfort of watching her parent peel off a blouse and say, “We’re all women here.” Beneath those moments of absurdity lies something tender and unresolved: a daughter trying to find her father inside a woman she barely knows.
Faludi’s storytelling moves between intimate family moments and sharp historical critique. She doesn’t write her father’s gender transition as a sentimental metamorphosis, nor as a simplistic act of liberation. Instead, she questions whether identity is ever solid, whether the self can be anything other than a negotiation between truth and disguise. Watching her father oscillate between pride and denial, compassion and cruelty, Faludi keeps asking the same quiet question: who was this person, really? The man who once terrorized his family, or the woman who now basks in the attention of old-fashioned Hungarian waiters who kiss her hand?
In one of the most powerful scenes, Faludi takes her father to the Hungarian National Museum. The exhibits minimize Hungary’s role in the Holocaust, glossing over the collaboration of local fascists. Only in a small basement room, literally underground, do they find a display of survivors’ portraits. There, Stefánie finally breaks. She looks at the faces of Jewish families who perished and shouts into the silence: “They were your neighbours! They were your friends! And you let them die!” The woman who had spent her life trying to erase her Jewishness finally speaks as one. For Faludi, it’s the first time her father’s identities, Jewish, Hungarian, woman, collide into something raw and real.
Mörkrummet is not a story of easy reconciliation. Faludi doesn’t offer redemption where there is none. Her father remains mercurial, charming and cruel, wounded and manipulative. Even in femininity, she clings to control, lecturing Susan about what it means to be a “lady,” yet never fully addressing the violence of the past. But the book’s brilliance lies in how Faludi refuses to resolve that contradiction. She sees her father’s transformation as both an act of truth and another form of disguise. The surgery didn’t erase the man who raised her, just as makeup and dresses didn’t erase the scars left by war.Patricia Piolon’s translation captures the melancholy rhythm of Faludi’s prose and the emotional chiaroscuro of her scenes, the constant interplay of light and shadow, warmth and coldness, intimacy and estrangement. Reading Mörkrummet in Swedish heightens its sense of exile and return, as if Faludi’s story were not only about her father but also about the impossibility of belonging anywhere, to any single self.
By the time the reader reaches the final pages, Stefánie is old and fading, her laughter echoing through empty rooms in Budapest. She dies at eighty-seven, leaving behind a daughter who still cannot quite define her. Yet Faludi’s act of writing becomes its own form of reconciliation. She doesn’t forgive in the easy sense; she understands. Her father’s life, full of masquerades and transformations, was also a mirror of the century that shaped them both, a century of survival through reinvention.
Mörkrummet asks what it means to live with contradictions, to love someone who has hurt you, to see gender and identity not as fixed truths but as shifting rooms within the same dark house. In that sense, Faludi’s title feels perfect. The darkroom is where images are developed, where light and shadow mix until something true emerges. For Susan Faludi, the darkroom is also where she finally sees her father, not as the man he was, nor as the woman she became, but as both, flickering together in one impossible, unforgettable portrait.
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